CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Australopithecine, Noam Chomsky, Social Cognition
4 Dec 2018
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What we know of our ancestors" bodies come from fossils, but there are two problems with this. This we rely on scant artifacts, but even those appear relatively recently. It is thought that one bone in a billion becomes fossilized. That means, for the population of canada (34 million), six of the human bones around today will end up getting fossilized. The oldest fossils of fully-formed humans are only 50,000 to 100,000 years old. If language is an instinct, like chomsky implies, it probably had to evolve for longer than humans have been around. We don"t know that they didn"t use tools. Only stone and metal tools last, most modern hunter-gatherer societies of today have more biodegradable tools than stone ones. The oldest human fossils were found in africa, from about 100,000 years ago. However, some stuff found in zaire has modernish-looking tools, dated. It is estimated that 1 in 10,000 species ever gets fossilized.
